Wireless technology within the home has become increasingly prevalent due to the ease of connectivity offered by mature standards such as WiFi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee. Although the radio channel enables untethered communication, in-home wireless devices, such as laptop computers, speakers, etc., are often found connected to wall power outlets to provide a stable source of energy for extended periods of time.
The emergence of smart home technology promises an increasing number of devices that may be connected to the wireless network. However, many intelligent appliances and sensors, such as energy consumption monitors and multi-media devices, will be non-mobile and will require connection to the household alternating current (“AC”) power distribution network for practical implementation.
This observation can be used to improve the physical layer performance of future in-home wireless networks by using the readily-accessible power distribution network as an additional multiple-access channel. Current standards for broadband power-line communication (“PLC”) are quite similar to wireless standards at the physical layer with both employing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (“OFDM”) to achieve high data transfer rates through wideband frequency-selective fading channels without requiring complex equalization filters [11]. This suggests that a wireless signal could also be transmitted over the PLC channel (or a PLC signal could be transmitted over the wireless channel) with very little modification.
It is, therefore, desirable to provide a system and method for providing a diversity communications channel over a power-line communications channel to support computing devices connected to a wireless communications network.